Posted
by
Soulskill
on Saturday April 24, 2010 @12:37PM
from the partly-cloudy-with-a-chance-of-tux dept.

darthcamaro writes "The cloud is more than just hype for Ubuntu. Canonical COO Matt Asay is now saying that they can count 12,000 deployments of the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud. He also thinks the cloud is where Ubuntu can make money — because in his view, the company for the last five years wasn't set up to generate revenue. From the article: 'The conversion of non-paying to paying users is often a difficult ratio to report for any open source effort, and Ubuntu is no exception. Asay noted that Canonical plans to get more aggressive at tracking its free-to-paid ratio on Ubuntu Linux and its related services and technologies. "For the first five years of the company's life, it wasn't set up to make money," Asay said. "The company was set up to make a fantastic Linux distribution and other tools around it and get it out there and get people using it. That was the focus." That's now changing at Canonical as the emphasis is now shifting to generating revenues.'"

Same here. The final straw for me is plymouth....on servers. You can't get away from the graphical boot apparently. All the core packages depend on it. And guess what doesn't work on my server? Plymouth. So I can't graphically boot, and I can't remove it.

Plymouth originated as a RedHat technology [fedoraproject.org], so expect to see it there too. Wouldn't be surprised to find it in the next Debian too--it's where everybody else is going. The ability to "degrade" back to simple text mode is supposed to be there. I expect that months from now, part of the standard set of tricks every Linux server admin knows will be how to force Plymouth into text mode. I believe this works:

plymouth-set-default-plugin text

/usr/libexec/plymouth/plymouth-update-initrd

...presuming that you can get your server booted via single user mode or via rescue disk to execute the commands. Not sure if there's a grub-based solution here that always works; adding "nomodeset" is the first thing to try.

Plymouth originated as a RedHat technology [fedoraproject.org], so expect to see it there too. Wouldn't be surprised to find it in the next Debian too--it's where everybody else is going. The ability to "degrade" back to simple text mode is supposed to be there. I expect that months from now, part of the standard set of tricks every Linux server admin knows will be how to force Plymouth into text mode. I believe this works:

plymouth-set-default-plugin text

/usr/libexec/plymouth/plymouth-update-initrd

...presuming that you can get your server booted via single user mode or via rescue disk to execute the commands. Not sure if there's a grub-based solution here that always works; adding "nomodeset" is the first thing to try.

Turns out there's something weird going on between my two fakeraid cards (which I use in JBOD mode so I can get extra SATA ports onto this older motherboard) and Ubuntu. 8.04 works great, everything else fails, drops disks, or core dumps. Debian apparently has no problem.

Ubuntu is a very nice starting distro to get into the knowledge of Linux. I'm glad they make it work as well as they have (in my experience I had minor issues between 9.04/9.10)
I hope they can find a way to make proper funding and really make improvements to the other flavors (KDE variant Kubuntu being sometimes quite broken)

If they start charging to get Ubuntu, then the balance tips back in favor of the defacto "standard" OS that everyone else uses.

They aren't charging people to install Ubuntu on their laptops. They're starting to charge people for support on Ubuntu server and for in the cloud services. The only way you'll be paying for Ubuntu on your desktop is if you need support or if you want to backup your machine online with Ubuntu.

This is a GPL product. If they were to start charging for a copy, one guy would buy it then give it away for free to everyone else. That's not much of a business model for anyone.

More specifically they are not charging for Ubuntu they are charging for Canonicals services http://www.ubuntu.com/support/services [ubuntu.com]. More logically if Mark Shuttleworth really does want to push Canonical forward, than a cooperative franchise set up will likely be the best route to established localised support services upon a global basis. Then using the distributed abilities of all those franchises whether local retail or local commercial services to support the various distributions of Ubuntu produced by

piracy = capturing and looting ships on the high seas (without the backing of a nation, then it is war)

I don't disagree with that statement.
However, the term 'piracy' usually used as 'music piracy' or 'movie piracy' is commonly used and everyone knows immediately what you are talking about rather than saying "Someone who downloads music over the internet that they didn't pay for and don't have a right to download". It's easier to just say 'pirate'. And using the surrounding context, you can probably guess that I'm not talking about someone looting ships on the high sea.

So if it wasnt set up to make money for the last 5 years - but that time is over - what changes will we see?

Will the growth in cloud / corporate paid users be enough to make the company and quality of the distribution grow ala Red Hat (which some would argue pushed the focus on users to the side for corporate..)?

Or will the money not be enough and will start to put the crunch on Ubuntu - and what end user ramifications would that have?

Shuttleworth, as far as i can tell, never planned to make money with Canonical and Ubuntu. He's rich enough to subsidize the two indefinitely. So the fact that Ubuntu might now actually start to generate self-sustaining or even profitable revenues is extra credit, and always was. I think any future changes in the companies are still going to reflect the culture of emphasizing a good, widely deployed Desktop Linux rather than necessarily turning a profit.

I think any future changes in the companies are still going to reflect the culture of emphasizing a good, widely deployed Desktop Linux rather than necessarily turning a profit.

There could also be the fact that in many people's (and PHB's) eyes, if you don't pay through the nose for it then it has to be crap.

Hopefully a more commercial Ubuntu will help make it more visible in the corporate space as well as promote the integration of tools in that area (they're already there of course, you just have to add them yourself).

It's unfortunate that you had to go with the old "screw the techie" prediction, because the first part of your post was quite right and doesn't deserve to be grouped under the -1 Troll mod. Given Shuttleworth's own statements and actions, here's what I see the business plan being:

0) It's nearly impossible to compete with Microsoft on non-OS products, because of their monopoly status.

1) Take a product that has the potential to make an OS a commodity, nullifying Microsoft's major competitive advantage in ever other market.

2) Turn that product into an actual competitor by matching or exceeding Windows in quality and features

3) Get people using the product, and more importantly get vendors selling it

4) Produce products that compete in a different market, and take advantage of having a free, commodity OS

5) Profit on those other products now that MS can't use their Windows marketshare as the sole competitive advantage

-1) Sue the U.S. government for allowing illegal monopolistic tactics by Microsoft to run rampant, and for those supposed to be keeping tabs on them for falling asleep at the wheel. Give citizens back their choice of software on the computers they purchase. If not Linux, at least allow a no-OS option.

It seems that a number of companies focus on long term profits as opposed to short term (like Amazon for example) so it doesn't surprise me that the last five years have not been chiefly about profit. I doubt they had their eyes on the cloud as a promising revenue stream back when they started up so the chance they are taking by adding it doesn't seem that great. I'd bet that they still have a longer view of how they could reach full profitability since they seem to have favored using their Ubuntu project

My theory is that if the focus is generating revenues, not the customer (or the product), failure is to be expected in this case

Why to people always act like these things are mutually exclusive? Who wants customers that can't undertand that the people providing them with the goods and services they want won't be there if they're bankrupt? Companies have to keep customers in mind, and customers who like those companies can't complain that money needs to change hands for the relationship to grow and thrive.

I think it is often because of experiences where people within a company forgot about the customers and just started thinking about the money. You can't make money if you don't have any customers, and when customers start leaving some managers start panicking and make things even worse. We've all seen it happen at one time or another. Your favorite store stops stocking the items you really want. They start refusing to special order items (when they never had a problem in the past). They stop calling you by

Because consumers are used to being fucked over, because they usually GET fucked over. Capitalism is directly contrary to morality. If you care about your customers, you will be replaced by the next asshole in line who is willing to fuck them over. The world then fills up with corporations like that, which slowly become more and more able to fuck them over as they become monopolies and thus the only choice, allowing their products and services to suck more, and themselves to profit more. Unless governme

The community counts a lot. Also, popularity helps a lot, especially for a FLOSS project. When I go looking for walk-throughs or tutorials for some FLOSS application, Ubuntu is nearly always used as an example. Every distribution has its idiosyncrasies, which of course is why there are different distributions, so it makes life easier if the idiosyncrasies of the distribution you're using are specifically addressed.

There are some things I like about Fedora -- in general, that it's more conventional in several respects. Canonical is developing a habit of innovating first, documenting later, for important features -- take Upstart, for instance, which handles startup and shutdown processes.

I notice that I'll read sysadmins saying they like to use Ubuntu on their personal computers, but some other distribution on their servers, usually Debian or CentOS. One expects different things from different computers.

If you got MSSQL (Microsoft SQL server) running on Ubuntu, you are one talented mofo

My employer has one Linux server (currently running Ubuntu 8.04 LTS) and one Windows server (running Windows Server 2003). When I tried to get a PHP program on the Ubuntu server to talk to the M$ SQL Server Express instance on the Windows server, all the ODBC driver would give me was "Failed to fetch error message".

*groan* I feel you. I am a sysadmin too and one of our marketing companies doing SEO decided to redo our largest clients websites.

Currently the clients sites are living on the win 2k3 server I administer (the only windows production server we still run) and they wanted to know if they did the sites in in PHP or Drupal on one of our existing Linux servers if they could still connect to the mssql backend on the windows server.

So the boss calls me into the meeting and they asked me this, I said hell no since I

Yeah strange you should mention pay since in my case it's not that good either. Great environment to work in though - one day the boss arrived with fifty of those huge balls chicks exercise with and plonked them down in the office.

We often sit on them for meetings or to work at our desks, or kick them around.

Great place to work, lower than average pay. I wonder if it is a trend in it?

Does the Sybase protocol still work with newer versions of Microsoft SQL Server?

but really, just use PostgreSQL, much better.

One of the applications that we started to use before I came to the company is a commercial off-the-shelf set of VBA scripts that runs in Access, and it expects to talk to either Access's built-in database or Microsoft SQL Server. We've been trying to migrate some functions away from that to an in-house system running on Ubuntu and using a free SQL DBMS. But we aren't even close to replicating every feature that we use, and we s

Pure fanboyistic bullshit. If these people were reasoning their choices out, they would use Microsoft Windows 7, the finest operating system yet to come from Redmond. The pure joy of using Microsoft Windows 7 is a bargain at twice the price, I assure you. And security? Brother, let's not even talk about security. Microsoft Windows 7.

When Fedora first came out, I felt like Red Hat went out of their way to make fedora the "hobbiest" version, and RHEL the "corporate" version. Have they got more or less divergent as time has gone on? It's kind of nice to run the same version of the software at home and in the server room, where Ubuntu is Ubuntu is Ubuntu. One less thing to deal with. Just wondering if I should give Fedora another try...

I looked at Fedora a year or so ago. The package manager was ok. (I prefer apt-get + synaptic, but yum + synaptic + rpm wasn't bad.) OTOH, the package selection was poor. They had most of the more common packages, but finding anything what wasn't in the main repository meant trusting someone I'd never heard of. Not something I like to do regularly. And sometimes even finding the repository was sufficient work that it was easier to compile from source. And sometimes that didn't work. Debian was just

At work they run redhat, and it takes the sysadmins a lot of panicking to get packages installed I need to do my job (research programming). One line apt-get install for my Debian laptop or Ubuntu server (yes, I know I'm doing it wrong).

So you're saying RPM packages are more difficult to make than DEBs? I have an idea. Why not make the packages agnostic to the package managers, so you can choose the packaging format you like the best along with the manager you like the best? You know, freedom? All you have to do is load the package up with metadata to cover everyone's needs, and viola, a package that can be installed on any distro. That should help cut down on silly customized and tweaked builds of developer's software, and force the

Not so much harder to make as fewer premade available. It is my opinion that deb is the superior format as it has a more transparent format and forces package designers to reduce reliance on custom scripts, thus simplifying removal, but in the end both formats do work.

Cross-distro packages are difficult because many distros are set up in incompatible ways with respect to locations, etc. Debian comes with alien which converts rpms to debs automatically, however the new packages don't always work quite right.

I'm using Ubuntu right now, but a coworker told me he prefers Fedora (quote: "Any OS that fits on a single CD can't be any good."). Meanwhile my company is using Red Hat for their development.

What makes one Linux better than another?

I say the same thing about programming languages. Any application that doesn't carry a runtime dependency of at least a few hundred megs can't be any good. That's why I use the.NET framework. Oh--I also hate freedom and kick puppies.

a coworker told me he prefers Fedora (quote: "Any OS that fits on a single CD can't be any good.").

I assume that quote is supposed to be from your coworker. Either your coworker never said that, or your coworker is an idiot. I have a Fedora 12 CD. The whole thing fit right on there, and the live session works perfectly. If your coworker really said that, tell him to switch distros, because by his own ideas, Fedora can't be any good.

"Better" is not a concept you can apply to Linux distributions, anymore than you can apply it to (wait for it...) cars. Is a giant Ford truck better than a Prius? Well that really depends on how large the stuff you have to move in the near future is, doesn't it?

The better Linux distribution for you is the one that matches your business or personal priorities more closely. Since those are your priorities, no one else can answer that question for you.

It always helps to try out different versions of linux. There are always little things that are different, or little things that work in one and not in another.

For example, I run Ubuntu on my desktop and normally run Kubuntu on my laptop. Since Ubuntu is more Gnome-centered the KDE version would have little bugs here and there (updating to 9.04 killed wireless networking - had to switch to WICD with a wired connection, I had a bunch of "available updates" appearing in the updater, only to tell me I can't ac

The company was set up to make a fantastic Linux distribution and other tools around it and get it out there and get people using it. That was the focus." That's now changing at Canonical as the emphasis is now shifting to generating revenues.

We're fine with moving priority to the new objective as soon as you've completed the former.;-)

Anecdotally, I have intel graphics (reportedly always affected by the bug), I am running the test replacement from the PPA, and if I leave my machine sitting for any length of time I find it very hot and in text mode, often with a kernel panic. I've been updating once or twice daily...

<quote><blockquote><div><p>The company was <b>set up to make a fantastic Linux distribution</b> and other tools around it and get it out there and get people using it. That was the focus." That's now changing at Canonical as the emphasis is now shifting to generating revenues.</p></div></blockquote><p>We're fine with moving priority to the new objective as soon as you've completed the former.;-)Ubuntu 10.04 <a href="http://it.slashdot.org/story

If I were looking for paid support Linux, I would go with RHEL. They have more experience in this kind of thing and have been around longer. Plus, I like RHEL for enterprise use. It has good tools for use in the enterprise - a certificate management system, a good directory server, deployment tools, etc.

We use RHEL/CentOS for a lot of servers, but while they're stable and reliable, they're also using old versions of a lot of packages which aren't compatible with the latest shiny things. So if you want to run SuperWhizzoWebService you may well have to either upgrade packages on your RHEL server to the latest versions (which is often a real pain) or just run a more 'bleeding edge' distribution.

I'm not a fan of Ubuntu on servers, but if it has to run shiny things and doesn't need to be up 24/7/365 then it may

If you want to setup a cloud deployment on, say, Amazon's EC2, it's quite easy [ubuntu.com], and then once you're up and running you can then decide if you want to buy support for that deployment.

If instead you visit RedHat's cloud page [redhat.com], you'll see no similar guide to getting started. As far as I can tell, this is because you need to have a RHEL license to even get access to their EC2 AMI files. As close as you can get for free is the RightScale AMI for CentOS [amazonwebservices.com].

RHEL has given me significantly more pain than Ubuntu. They have a bad habit of breaking things in updates.

Freaky. I've had far more pain from Ubuntu updates than RHEL/CentOS.... the last CentOS upgrade from 5.3 to 5.4 took about an hour with almost no intervention, whereas the Ubuntu upgrade from 9.04 to 9.10 took a day with lots of intervention before the system was working again.

That said, many of the things I had to fix up on Ubuntu were services I don't run on CentOS, such as MythTV and Zabbix.

Why don't they just take a bunch of polls and ask if people use Ubuntu, and if they pay?

Or maybe they could make it so that paying ubuntu users get a slight bandwidth preference for update/distro packages --- but this actually means a very small flag is applied to their system. Those numbers can be counted.

Lots of people like to claim that "Free is a business model". In
one sense I agree: Giving away some things for free so you can make money other
ways can work. But free by itself is not a business model.

This is what Canonical has decided. After 5 years of trying to be
successful in giving a way a free client operating system, they have decided to
stop lighting money on fire and do something to make a profit.

They actually don't compete with Amazon here- Ubuntu's cloud software is AWS compatible, and provides a pretty natural migration path for companies looking at moving from public to private clouds as they scale.

Sure - if the first order criteria is going to a private cloud from a public
cloud. But cost, reliability, features, operations (and likely others) will all
be factors here. All the public cloud providers will compete with Canonical by
saying

"Dont go private! We can provid you with cloud services more effecitcly,
just as securetly, at better scale, and for less costs than you can do it
yourselves!".

Sure - if the first order criteria is going to a private cloud from a public
cloud.

For a lot of companies, it is- and for a lot of startups, the ability to scale from 0 to 1 million users without getting screwed on either end sounds like a pretty good deal. I'm not claiming that this is going to make them Microsoft (or even Google) level profits- but they have a much lower outlay. They can survive in a smaller, more profitable niche.

But cost, reliability, features, operations (and likely others) will all
be factors here. All the public cloud providers will compete with Canonical by
saying

"Dont go private! We can provid you with cloud services more effecitcly,
just as securetly, at better scale, and for less costs than you can do it
yourselves!".

They may not always be right - but that is how they will complete.

IME, this is not how this argument goes. Everybody knows that AWS is going to beat you in scale over a short period of time, but a long-term dependency on the

>>> "It's nice having a viable, widely distributed Linux distro without a profit incentive.">> You mean... like Debian?> Width is relative, I suppose.. Debian is never going to rival Windows or OSX. Ubuntu might.

Why you think "Debian is never going to rival Windows or OSX"? Maybe it's exactly because it works "without a profit incentive" in which case the day Ubuntu turned that way it's the day Ubuntu will become a "mightbe rival" for Windows or OSX no more.

"Um, your argument is refuted by the premise of the original issue. Ubuntu has never had an intention of making money until now, and it's the most widely used distro among home users by far."

Not indeed. The fact that they try to turn into money now stablishes it as their plan from the origin just like when you start a building you start it going *down* for the fundations. Do you think that when they start to build up once the foundations are stablished is because the architect suddenly changed his mind?

you can argue that number 4 indicates an intention of making profit.. But I would argue it only represents the desire to make profit, and that there was no actual plan for how to go about that from the start. This new attempt to make money is nothing but an afterthought, which likely represents a decline in venture capital investments. I predict

Canonical appears to be following the stereotypical free software business model: sell services to which the free software can connect. One of them is the online storage service Ubuntu One [wikipedia.org].

Canonical appears to be following the stereotypical free software business model: sell services to which the free software can connect.

I'd argue the most common free software model is to sell hardware with free software installed on it in conjunction with services. It is actually very interesting to me that Canonical does not have a hardware offering and does not seem to be partnering with any hardware makers to customize Ubuntu for that company's devices. I don't understand why that is, but maybe it is just under the radar or they have good business reasons.

Don't forget servers and appliances. Oracle, IBM, Sun, and dozens more sell servers with Linux and other OSS pre-installed.

Most major PC OEMs and even local PC builders in my area don't advertise Linux PCs.

That's true, but with the advent of Netbooks and other cheap hardware a number of companies are selling Linux based computers. Walmart sells them on their Web site. I haven't seen many (any?) with Ubuntu though. Some major OEMs offer it as an option on some of their computers, but those same companies are hopelessly tied to MS for the vast majority of their offerings so they never go an

That's true, but with the advent of Netbooks and other cheap hardware a number of companies are selling Linux based computers. Walmart sells them on their Web site. I haven't seen many (any?) with Ubuntu though.

Dell [dell.com] has a few options at least. There's some more listed here [ubuntu.com] but no other big names. Trouble is that knowledgeable Linux users will usually check out if a laptop works with Linux and go with some better deal on the hardware rather than the preinstalls. It's a tough crowd to sell to...

...and is the result of vendor lock-in. Specifically, Microsoft locking themselves into basically ALL consumer hardware sold in stores. Why settle for an overpriced computer which is marked up simply because it caters to a niche market when it should be costing less, or why settle with a severe lack of options and models when you can have a much bigger selection if you pick a "Windows" computer and then fight off Microsoft, reject the EULA, etc, until they give you a refund for software you're not using?

They could really clean up by selling ARM laptops (not netbooks) with Ubuntu. There are a few ARM netbooks on the market right now, and no laptops (AFAIK). Normally you'd have real issues finding a niche that this would work for, given Win/x86 dependence, but I think Canonical could make it work for them.

Yeah Dell sells a few, but does not really advertise them or design products specifically for that OS. If they happen to have all components with Linux drivers, Dell sells it with Ubuntu as an option, if you know where to look. If not, they don't. Dell is completely beholden to MS for their bottom line though, so it is not surprising they don't do much with Ubuntu except when negotiating with MS. What surprises me is Ubuntu does not seem to have partnered with anyone to customize Ubuntu for specific hardwar

Well, Dell sells some models with Ubuntu preinstalled. For some time there'd been a link to Dell's offerings on ubuntu homepage. But yes, more computers with Ubuntu preinstalled (and approved by Canonical) would be nice.

If Canonical wants to make some desktop money, they should sell desktops with their software pre-installed and guaranteed to work, as in no hoop jumping for wifi support, whatever video is there, sound really works, etc.. They can still offer the freebie download version to all comers, but desktop purchasers get priority in the forums and support, etc. Just make it reasonably price competitive and it could work, no offering a $300 machine for $800 in other words just because it says official Ubuntu on it, b

Ya, Dell and some others offer preinstalled..but that isn't Canonical offering it. It needs to be *their* machines with their software that they know will work.

Canonical certified all the Dell desktops, laptops and netbooks that ship with Ubuntu pre-installed, they even provide Dell a custom install image of Ubuntu that is designed to work with those particular hardware setups.

I am well aware of Dell selling a few examples of Ubuntu based computers. And if you go to Dell's mainpage, not knowing they sold Ubuntu, you wouldn't know it, it is hidden. It's there on the site, but joe sixpack wouldn't see it. OK, so say I am joe sixpack, go to their main page, click over to desktops http://www.dell.com/home/desktops [dell.com]. On the side there they list "operating systems". I see windows, vista and 7. So this theoretical purchaser would have to know in advance they even sold Ubuntu to start sea

Sorry, for *his* complaint, that's why we have the AGPL. Unfortunately, it's not widely used. With cloud-style applications becoming more common, this will eventually be appreciated by some end users.

Web accessable applications are an area where the GPL places no restrictions on source code availability. In this area, it's in the same boat as the BSD. The AGPL addresses this weakness, and is compatible with GPL3. (I.e., GPL code can be moved to AGPL [though not, I believe, vice versa].)CAUTION: IANAL

You seem to think that Ubuntu increasing their drive to a Red Hat-based business model means Ubuntu will come out with the same result as RHEL. I don't think that will be the case. Their development model seems to be different, with much more community involvement.